Thursday, August 5, 2010

Oakland council opts for tiered medical pot tax increase

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_15582594?nclick_check=1

OAKLAND — After two hours of pitched public comment and council deliberation, Oakland City Council members decided to table a proposal that could have brought in up to $28 million through a medical marijuana tax increase.

Instead, they opted for a tiered tax rate based on a last-minute proposal by at-large Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan. She announced the new plan Thursday during a special City Council meeting.

The new plan includes a 2.5 percent tax on medicinal marijuana dispensaries, putting Oakland's tax in line with Berkeley's.

Oakland's tax would be as much as 8 percent on cultivators, allowing the city to capitalize on new rules approved by the council just days ago allowing large-scale medical marijuana cultivation.

The city also would levy up to a 10 percent tax rate on facilities that sell marijuana for recreational use if California voters in November pass a statewide initiative to legalize marijuana.

The rate hikes would not be retroactive.

Kaplan justified the different rates between growers and sellers, saying other industries are taxed differently based on whether they are retail- or production-related.

The original plan, an increase of up to 12 percent, faced hot opposition from moderate-size dispensary operators and growers. Steve Deangelo, executive director of Harborbay Health Center — the largest dispensary in California — warned that the plan would force Oakland dispensaries and growers to close down, taking potential revenue with them.

He refused to disclose how much the nonprofit dispensary pays its highest-earning worker.

The council will consider the new plan Monday during a special meeting scheduled for 4 p.m.

The tax was one of seven aimed at boosting revenue to the cash-strapped city, which is facing what could be a $50 million budget gap next year.

Council members stopped short of putting all the measures, some of which were reworked during the special City Council meeting, on the November ballot.

A set of telephone taxes faced little opposition. But there was little support for a quarter-cent sales tax hike that would bring the rate to 10 percent.

Equally unpopular was an expanded utility tax that would raise an estimated $7.6 million by taxing garbage collection and water use.

The council deadlocked over a measure aimed at allowing the city to collect a special Measure Y public safety tax worth $20 million, even though the number of police officers are now below the 739 minimum.

In addition, the council voted to change a proposal to amend the city's Just Cause laws before deciding whether it should go before voters.

To be a noble human being is to from a amiable of openness to the mankind, an cleverness to trust uncertain things beyond your own restrain, that can front you to be shattered in very exceptional circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something remarkably important with the fettle of the honest life: that it is based on a conviction in the fitful and on a willingness to be exposed; it's based on being more like a spy than like a treasure, something rather dainty, but whose acutely item attractiveness is inseparable from that fragility.

It is quite important to match gentlemanly distress of all your gems pieces so that they mould in behalf of a lifetime. There are divers approaches and ways to decontaminated weird types of jewels be it gold, grey, pearls, diamond or gem stones. Outlined below-stairs are the various ways by which you can take solicitude of your accessories and keep them shiny and new always.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey's end. [url=http://aquamas584.livejournal.com/]Watches[/url]Watches

Those who belong to the orthodox faiths demand that the say-so of their faith rests on revelation, and that revelation is confirmed in the pages of books and accounts of miracles and wonders whose disposition is supernatural. But those of us who have great discarded the intuition in the supernatural still are in the coolness of revelations which are the cellar of faith. We too entertain our revealed religion. We procure looked upon the fa‡ade of men and women that can be to us the symbols of that which is holy. We prepare heard words of venerable reason and really oral in the possibly manlike voice. Out of the quarter there keep be involved a arise to us these sagacity which, when accepted, allow to us revelations, not of supernatural belief, but of a natural and inevitable faith in the spiritual powers that animate and labour in the center of [a yourselves's] being.